On Friday, March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Tohoku, Japan’s rural northeast, combined with a destructive tsunami to wipe out villages, ignite a nuclear crisis, and cause the greatest mass loss of life in Japan since World War II.

Caught in the disaster were the children of Tohoku, who went from finishing a school year one moment to facing tragedy the next.

‘I have no choice but to keep looking’: five years after the tsunami, a husband still searches the sea for his wife, joined by a father hoping to find his daughter. New York Times Magazine, 2 August 2016

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5 responses to this post.

Hello. My name is Andrew Grimes and I am the founder and director of Tokyo Counseling Services. Over the last two years we have in our free time created and initiated an organization to provide funding to support and enable professional mental health care, emotional counseling and psychotherapy services for all of the children under stress in the long recovery period of Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate Prefectures.

The charity we created is called APRICOT and this is as you may well guess an acronym as follows:

APRICOT = Allied Psychotherapy Relief Initiative for the Children of Tohoku.

We have created a basic website which we will soon be replacing with a new one which has been created by professional web designers, illustrators, writers, editors and others all of whom have freely donated their time, expertize and passion to help the children of Tohoku.

We are not professional translators and although our receptionists are doing their best we are in need of kind hearted individuals or companies who are professional J – E and E – J translators.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could consider helping us in any way you may be in a position to do. You can see our current website at: apricotchildren.org

Most importantly APRICOT’s mission is set in our hearts and minds: that we will together volunteer and work to protect the mental health and the healthy emotional and psychological development of the Children of the Tohoku Region over the coming seventeen years, that is until all of them enjoy their Coming of Age Days, when they will become young adults, healthy and happy:

No, it is I who should thank you! Thanks to you kindly circulating the information I posted on your SCBWI Japan and SCBWI Japan Translation Group email listservs APRICOT had several very positive replays and now two J —> E translators have joined us and as ‘Apricot Ambassadors’ are donating their free time and talents to translate for APRICOT’S monthly newsletter
(email: teamapricotchildrenATgmail.com if you are interested in subscribing! 🙂 .

What would be of great help to us would be if one or two kind souls who can translate from E —> J would be so gracious as to volunteer likewise. yoroshiku onegaishimasu!

Thank you for you great help and support for the APRICOT! We really do appreciate it very much. APRICOT – “For the children of Tohoku – no child left behind”

Hi my name is Naomi and I was wondering if you guys are going to translate the last of the Jade Trilogy Dragon Sword and Wind Child I love that book and the second book so much and it makes me a little sad that the last book is not translated yet so I was hoping if it’s possible for it to be translated as well as the other books of the Moribito series too

Hello! We would love to see further books in these series come out, too. Publishers make that decision. If you as a reader wish to see more books come out in a series, you can try contacting the publisher of the first books in the series: VIZ Media https://www.viz.com/company-contact for the Dragon Sword and Wind Child books, and Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic Inc.) http://www.arthuralevinebooks.com/contact.asp for the Moribito books. Both publishers are also on Twitter and Facebook.